Re: Modality changes proposal

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Thursday 02 of October 2003 15:45, Denis O. Mikhalkin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> we encountered several problems with the modality implementation in
> Metacity and it has been indicated that this problems mostly have roots
> in a _NET specification. Therefore we want to propose several extensions
> to the specification to fix such problems.
>
> 1. Misuse of TRANSIENT_FOR
>
> From the beginning, TRANSIENT_FOR was used for the purpose of
> declaring hierarchies of windows, usually defining parent-child relation
> among top-level windows, usually used for popup windows. It has been
> defined that TRANSIENT_FOR points to some top-level window and that
> there is some relation between such two windows. WMs were using this
> relation to perform different tasks on such windows as on parent-child
> group(minimize, hide, transfer across desktops, focus, raise and so on).
>
> In _NET, TRANSIENT_FOR is used for different purposes: to define modal
> groups. Now there is no way to defien parent-child relation when it
> might be needed. I think the meaning of TRANSIENT_FOR should be restored
> and other means should be used to define these new relations.

 There's no need to restore the meaning, since it hasn't changed. It's just 
that when STATE_MODAL was added, it was apparently deemed that parent-child 
relation matches the modality relation (since a modal dialog blocking some 
completely unrelated window is IMHO just plain wrong).

 Can you give some examples when the transiency relationship is not good 
enough?

[Snipped something quite long and complicated.]

 Do you have any real application that actually needs that? I'd like to see 
the reasons for this in practice.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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